When he was 29 years old, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone—a claim that is reportedly one of the most lucrative ever filed in the U.S. Patent Office. Not long after, the young inventor lost interest in the device and put his growing wealth toward other pursuits—such as giant kites capable of lifting people off the ground.

“It is fortunate for those interested in aeronautics and the exploration of the air that Professor Alexander Graham Bell has joined the band of experimenters and is lending his inventive genius to the cause,” wrote meteorologist Henry Helm Clayton, one of Bell’s admirers, in 1903. The goal of flying people on kites was hundreds of years old. But the late 19th- and early 20th-century work evolved directly into the planes we have today. A crucial step in the Wright brothers’ first successful powered flight in 1903 depended on their realization that a kite’s wings could be warped as the craft flew.

Bell and his team, called the Aerial Experiment Association, ultimately focused their kite designs on tetrahedrons, or pyramids made of four triangles, and biplane structures, several of which used red silk. When he died, Bell’s coffin was lined with the red silk.

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